Adding an External Wi-Fi Antenna to Your PSP

Not content with the factory-installed Wi-Fi adapter in his PSP, Seth Fogie added an external antenna to boost his signal strength and improve his signal-to-noise ratio. Here he shows how you can do it, too.

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The Sony PlayStation Portable is a wonderfully designed handheld
entertainment center. With it you can play games, listen to music, watch movies,
view images, and even surf the internet. To help the PSP perform all these
functions, it boasts a beautiful LCD screen and supports the Memory Stick Duo
(Sony proprietary), the Universal Media Disk (another Sony proprietary) drive,
and an embedded wireless network card.

Each of these features is important to the PSP's success, but in this
article we are going to focus our attention on one particular aspect of the PSP:
the wireless network card. In particular, we are going to examine the
possibilities of increasing the PSP's wireless signal strength to make it
more adaptable to situations where you might need a few extra dBs to get that
quality connection.

Before moving on, please note that this modification will void your warranty.
In addition, there is no guarantee that you will have a working PSP when you get
the device back together. And if that isn't enough, your new antenna must
be properly installed or your 'upgrade' will fail to perform as you
might hope. One final warning; this mod is not meant to be pretty. It works, but
you will have to deal with the presence of an external pigtail/antenna hanging
off your PSP. Thankfully, you can unscrew the antenna and just hide the smaller
and more flexible pigtail.

Why Add an External Antenna?

I purchased my first PSP soon after its release in the US. While it was fun
to play NFS and watch Spiderman-2, I was aching to see what was on the inside of
the device and subsequently took it apart. As I worked my way down through the
device, I noticed a small piece of plastic stuck under the right side controller
with a connecting wire that trailed over the main circuit board and disappeared
under the left side of the device. As it turned out, this was the antenna for
the embedded wireless network card (Figure 1).

For such a compact device, I was not really surprised to see this design.
After a few more minutes of disassembling the PSP, I was able to learn that this
antenna connected to the network card via a U.FL connector, which is typical for
embedded wireless network cards. Figure 2 illustrates what this connector looks
like, and Figure 3 provides you with an image of the original antenna in its
full glory.

Once I had noted the existence of the U.FL connector, and had removed the
original antenna, I wondered what would happen if I attached a larger antenna
with a little bit more oomph to it. Since the tight space limitations left me
with no room to grow on the inside, I decided to add on an external antenna
capable of increasing the signal, but still keep the PSP mostly portable and
user friendly. The rest of this article shows what I did and the results of my
upgrade.